Baltimore’s Yeshivat Rambam day school to close

(JTA) — Yeshivat Rambam, a Jewish day school in Baltimore, said it will be shutting down in June.

Yeshivat Rambam, which opened about 20 years ago and taught according to the Modern Orthodox philosophy of Torah U’Maddah, or Torah and secular knowledge, announced its closing in a statement Sunday night, the Baltimore Jewish Times reported.

The school already had announced in January that it would close its high school division in an effort to get the rest of the school on its feet financially while working to increase enrollment in kindergarten through eighth grade. But the financial situation reportedly proved to be too much for the award-winning school.

Parents and faculty were informed of the closing at separate meetings held Sunday night, according to the newspaper.

The school has retained a community-based, adolescent-family community relations counselor to help students, faculty and parents cope with the closing.

"Rambam faced rising costs, declining enrollment and a shrinking contributor base. Financial burdens were piling up. The time came for facing reality and making tough decisions," Rambam President Meyer Shields said Sunday night. "Thus we have called this meeting tonight to let you know that it is with great sadness that Rambam’s board of directors has voted to close Rambam at the end of the current academic year."

Classes will continue on a regular schedule until the end of the term. Yeshivat Rambam will help the students find other schools to attend.

Marcy Oster Marcy Oster is the briefs editor at JTA. She worked at the Cleveland Jewish News for more than a decade and was a senior staff reporter before moving to Israel in 2000. She has won several awards for her writing from The Press Club of Cleveland, the Society for Professional Journalists, Women in Communications and the American Jewish Press Association.